Son of Tsunami

The Boxing Day tsunami has several predecessors, scientists have found. Two papers in this week's Nature by Geoscience Australia researcher Amy Prendergast and team, and Kent State University Ohio scientist Katrin Monecke and colleagues have found evidence for at up to three previous massive tsunami...

Nanotube speakers

Conventional loudspeakers work by passing a current though a coil near a magnet. The current creates its own magnetic field and so is pushed or pulled by the magnet. If you keep changing the current you will move the coil backwards and forwards creating vibrations in the air, and with the right set ...

Clever elephants have learned to avoid roads

Forest elephants living in West Africa's Congo Basin have learned to avoid roads probably because they realise that where there are roads there are poachers with guns. That's according to a study published in the online journal Plos ONE, led by Stephen Blake from the Wildlife conservation Society. ...

Hybrid camera helps to see in more directions

Digital cameras are brilliant at looking in one direction, which is normally what you want to do, but sometimes you need to see to the sidesas well. The conventional solution to this problem is normally either to build a moving camera that can look in different directions or to use a fisheyelens. T...

Sabre-tooth tigers hunted in packs

Take a step back to the time when sabre-toothed tigers roamed the land. A new study has suggested these toothy predators were not lone hunters but may in fact have lived in packs like many social carnivores do today.That's according to Chris Carbone from the Zoological Society of London and his coll...

Famine makes genes hungry for life

Scientists have uncovered the first clear genetic evidence linking low birthweight and maternal malnutrition and subsequent ill-health. Writing in this week's PNAS Leiden University researchers Bastiaan Heijmans and his colleagues describe how they have analysed DNA samples from babies conceived dur...